Blacksmith Keeps Craft of Fire and Iron Alive

Deep within the shop complex of San Diego Gas & Electric Co., Janos Vajda can be heard hammering away at his anvil, sending a merry ringing sound resonating against the brick walls--a sound strangely out of place among air-powered drills, screaming lathes and slamming trunk hoods.

The Hungarian immigrant is one of the few true blacksmiths left in the county, and he creates unique parts and tools for SDG&E;, which services more than 1 million customers in the county with gas and electricity.

“I love my job,” he said, sweating by a gas furnace that reaches upwards of 3,000 degrees. “They treat me good. I wish to retire from here.”

Beside the stocky, 49-year-old stood the tools of his trade, slightly modified since he began studying blacksmithing as a 14-year-old in a small farming village in Hungary.

The coal forge and huge leather bellows, has been replaced by a sleek gas furnace. Air powered presses provided a little more force than just his hammer to cut through metal and form red-hot blobs of steel into various shapes.

But the work Vajda loves most is still the work he can do by hand, with gripping tools and hammers he says he envisions as extensions of his body.

“I like to work with the anvil the most,” he said. “Because you are working with your hands and shaping it to come out into whatever it is you make. You have to have a feel for it.”

Vajda makes and repairs more than 150 different tools, from shackles used to pull cable to probes used to punch holes in the ground near gas lines to search for leaks.

One tool Vajda designed was a tong used to pick up telephone and power poles. The tongs used previously were too heavy to handle easily, and were weak at the axle, said Virgil Cook, shop foreman.

Vajda designed a 40-pound tong that was certified to lift 4,500-pound poles safely, Cook said.

“He’s a very talented man,” he said. “There isn’t anything I’ve given him that he couldn’t do.”

He is also the busiest, Cook said. Tools awaiting repair are stacked in the yard, and orders for new tools are backlogged. Vajda’s duties also include making parts for the welding and machine shops at the complex, southeast of downtown at 10th and Imperial avenues.

Cook set out to find another blacksmith to help out Vajda on a contract basis, but was dismayed that the nearest one qualified to do the work was in Los Angeles.

Cook said Vajda is indispensable. Some of Vajda’s work, such as making rings and couplers, may be custom manufactured by other companies, but finding someone to craft the special tools that are Vajda’s handiwork will be very difficult.

Because of company cutbacks, and the rarity of qualified blacksmiths, Cook does not know if Vajda will be replaced when he eventually retires.

“We’ll have to face that when the time comes,” he said.

SDG&E; was founded in 1881 and employed a blacksmith to shoe the company’s fleet of about 20 horses, said company spokesman Fred Vaughn. The company blacksmith probably spend most of his time shoeing horses and forging parts for the carriages.

Vajda has plenty of experience shoeing horses but now mostly concentrates on tools. One of his favorites are delicately curved shackles used to pull cable. Vajda forms them from a bar of tool steel, high quality metal used especially for tool heads. He heats the bar to red-hot, then pounds the middle into a round shaft. He rounds the ends and pounds the whole thing into a circle, ending up with something that looks nothing like what he started with.

He also forges heads for jackhammers. He tempers them by dipping them in water and scraping the red-hot tip with a stone. He holds it out of the water, waiting for colors on the exposed shiny metal to turn gold, then red, then blue before plunging the piece back in to end the tempering process.

“Now it can cut steel,” he said, demonstrating by chipping a steel vise with it.

“Sometimes they need only 10 tools,” he said, explaining why he hand-makes a variety of specialized tools. “Nobody wants to put up a whole factory to make them.”

Vajda has lived in San Diego for 20 years, working variously as a blacksmith and plumber. He hasn’t been able to visit his family in Hungary since he defected in 1969 but hopes to see them this year.

Vajda was 3 years old when Russian authorities arrested his father for hiding a German fighter pilot and took him to Siberia. The family never heard from him again.

Vajda’s family was branded as anti-communist, and he experienced discrimination throughout school and at work while living in Hungary.

He escaped to a refugee camp at an American military base in Italy. He eventually ended up in New York.

He has been with SDG&E; in San Diego five years, and makes about $33,000 a year.

“Some people say it’s a dirty, nasty, primitive place,” he said, looking around at his shop. “But they see what I can create, and they are surprised.”

He lives in Santee with a wife and 9-year-old son. He doesn’t do much blacksmithing in his spare time, except maybe forging toys such as slingshot frames for his son.

Times staff writer Terry Rather contributed to this story.